Revision as of 04:47, 5 July 2012

The Encase image file format is used by EnCase used to store various types of digital evidence e.g.

disk image (physical bitstream of an acquired disk)

volume image

memory

logical files

The format is (reportedly) based on ASR Data's Expert Witness Compression Format.
Currently there are 2 version of the format; version 1 is a closed format and was succeeded by version 2 in EnCase 7, for which a format specification is available, but requires registration.

The media data can be stored in multiple evidence files, which are called segment files.
Each segment file consist of multiple sections, which has a distinct section start definition containing a section type.
Up to EnCase 5 the segment file were limited to 2 GiB, due to the internal 31-bit file offset representation. This limitation was lifted by adding a base offset value in EnCase 6.

EnCase allow to store the data compressed either using a fast or best level of compression.
EnCase 7 no longer distinguishes between fast or best compression and just offers uncompressed or compressed.

Besides digital evidence the evidence files, or segment files, contain a header containing case information.
The case information which entails date and time of acquisition, an examiner's name, notes on the acquisition, and an optional password.

In EnCase 3 the case information header is stored in the "header" section, which is defined twice within the file and contain the same information.

As of EnCase 4 an additional "header2" section was added. The "header" section now appears only once, but the new "header2" section twice.

The format adds error detection by storing the data with checksums (Adler32), for both the metadata as the data blocks, which are by default 64 x 512 byte sectors (32 KiB).
As of EnCase 5 the number of sectors per block (chunk) can vary.
EnCase 3F introduced an "error2" section that it uses to record the location and number of bad sector chunks. The way it handles the sections it can't read is that those areas are filled with zero.
Then EnCase displays to the user the areas that could not be read when the image was acquired. The granularity of unreadable chunks appears to be 32K.
As of EnCase 5 the granularity of unreadable chunks can vary.

EnCase 3 can store a one-way hash of the data. For a bitstream it does so by calculating e.g. a MD5 hash of the original media data and adds a hash section to the last of the segment file.
As of EnCase 6 the option to store a SHA1 hash was added.

EnCase 5 and later have the option to store single files into the EnCase Logical Evidence File (LEF) or EWF-L01.
This format changed slightly in EnCase 6 and 7.

In EnCase 7 the EWF format was succeeded by the EnCase Evidence File Format Version 2 (EWF2-EX01 and EWF2-LX01).
EWF2-EX01 is at it's lower levels a different format then EWF-E01 and provides support for:

bzip compression

direct encryption (AES-256) of the data

The same features are added to the new logical evidence file format (EWF2-LX01) with the exception of encryption.
EWF2-EX01, EWF2-LX01 are not backwards compatible with previous EnCase products.